White House Rejects Marcus Garvey Posthumous Pardon

The White House recently rejected a bid to posthumously pardon Marcus Garvey.

The campaign, led by a Jamaican lawyer in Florida, would overturn Garvey’s 1920s mail fraud conviction that imprisoned the Black leader for almost three years before he was released and deported to Jamaica.

Garvey, who led the greatest mass movement of Blacks in the United States in the first half of the 20th century and is often credited by historians and other experts with promoting the economic, social and political interests of the ordinary Black person as no other had been able to do for more than half a century, had a following that ran into the millions in the Western Hemisphere.